Gaetan Sene has taken out the “City Race” in La Torche, a side event to the SUP surfing world tour event that’s happening in France this week.

With most of the surfing internationals sitting out the race, it was a four-way battle to the line between the talented French trio of Gaetan, Arthur Arutkin and Greg Closier, as well as Italy’s Leonard Nika.

Here’s the top five and a few pics from what was a very scenic race. No results have been posted yet but we’ll update when we hear anything more.

Also got a quick recap from the Greg:

“The race was missing some big names, with the international guys focusing more on the surfing this week. However Zane (Schweitzer) was there along with Giorgio (Gomez) and the two Nika brothers from Italy.

It was a very tactical race with strong currents. In the middle of the course a group of four made a gap: Gaetan, Arthur, Leo and myself.

The strategy was quite strange: All three of us wanted to follow Gaetan, who is an expert in the river and knows how to read the currents, however he didn’t want to do all the work of dragging us along.

We switched up the lead but we were afraid of taking the wrong line in the river and allowing the other guys like Zane to catch back up. Gaetan tried to make several breaks but he couldn’t get away from the three of us.

Gaetan had his own tactics: He didn’t want to tire himself out dragging us along, but he didn’t want to slow down and let the others catch up.

In the final kilometre everybody sprinted hard to the line and it was super close, with Gaetan first, Arthur 2nd, myself 3rd and Leo 4th. Leo and I crashed into each other and fell in just one metre before the finish, with both of us scrapping to get over the line.

It was a very interesting race!”

2014 La Torche City Race RESULTS

1st: Gaetan Sene
2nd: Arthur Arutkin
3rd: Greg Closier
4th: Leonard Nika
5th: Yoann Cornelis